emodir 2022-01-27 notes

Welcome and administrative details

10 min.

Note well

Request participants to be familar with the IETF notewell as it applies to this meeting.

The session was not recorded.

Introductions

Everyon introduced themselves briefly:

Dominique Barthel (ROLL co-chair, also active at LPWAN)
Jenny Bui, IETF Secretariat
Andrew Campling
Dhruv Dhody
Mijra Kühlewind, IAB Chair
Cindy Morgan
Alexa Morris, IETF Secretariat
Karen O'Donoghue, emodir co-coordinator
Alice Russo, RPC
Rich Salz
Lee-Berkeley Shaw
Greg Wood, emodir co-coordinator

Review of emodir purpose and approach (led by Karen O'Donoghue)

From the emodir charter: the IETF Education, Mentoring & Outreach Directorate strives to enhance the productivity of IETF work, expand the diversity and inclusiveness of the IETF, and enable the IETF to facilitate technical development and innovation in the Internet.

Newcomer’s Program update (led by Jenny Bui)

15 min.

"Newcomers" are formally defined as participating in 5 or fewer IETF meetings
- usually self-declared during IETF meeting registration
- may also consider looking at IETF Datatracker to determine <5 meeting registrations

• Review of Newcomers related questions in the 112 meeting survey
  • Sent in advance of meetings to get input
  • Generally satisfied with activities, could measure better, low engagement but participants satisfied
  • Consider short survey only to newcomers (3-5 questions) after the fact. A suggested focus: did you get what you wanted out of the meeting?
• Past Newcomers activities
  • Newcomers videos and pre-meeting webinars (~15 participants)
  • Escape rooms (~6 people)
  • Coffee breaks during the meeting (7-8 people from around the world, lots of repeat participants)
• Plans for 113 activities

Q: Has there been a difference in engagement for online vs. in-person meetings?
A: Yes, more difficult to engage online, perhaps more participants in person. And things like Guides program probably more effective in person.

Q: Are newcomers in the online meetings more selective about participation (e.g. do they drop in/out of particular sessions vs. being at the meeting all week)
A: No data to know this at the moment (Meetecho might have data).

Q: What is the 'retention' rate of newcomers (i.e. newcomers that come back to subsequent meetings) and what are the factors that contribute to those outcomes.
A: Consider looking at data from registration

Follow up: Greg will follow-up on the questions about participaition and newcomer retention to see if the data is available and may be used for these purposes

Plan for I-Ds and RFCs tutorials and materials (led by Alice Russo)

15 min.

With new formats and tools, what materials or tutorials would be helpful for (potential) document authors?

Last tutorial on authoring was during IETF104 on XML and Markdown

• What topics would be helpful to cover?
  • Quick-start guide: "10 steps to an I-D" for both XML and Markdown (Alice will send via email some example starts at a few)
  • Perhaps short videos and with Q&A sessions
  • How to advance my idea in the IETF (aka, or perhaps related to, "bringing new work to the IETF"): more about how to move a document through the IETF process
  • Document life cycle
  • Tips and Tricks

Noted: I-Ds are often written close to the I-D deadline for a pariticular meeting.

Remarked: So many options can be confusing, suggest picking a single "recommended" version (esp. for newcomers)

Data on markdown usage when posting a new I-D:
* In the I-D repository today, there are 213 version -00 drafts with XML files. Based on comments within the files:
* 72 of 213 were created using kramdown-rfc2629
* 8 of 213 were created using mmark
* 2 of 213 were created using id2xml
* I-D Authoring Survey has data as well

Suggestion: Have something simple to point authors to for the most common authoring modes

(Alice provided some examples of Quick Start guides via email to the emo-dir mailing list shortly after the call which are also included below for easy reference)

• Who could/should provide input and provide review of tools?
  • Mirja, Andrew, and Alice offered to provide input for developing materials

See:
* I-D Authoring Survey results and analysis
* https://authors.ietf.org : education and documentation for authoring I-Ds
* https://author-tools.ietf.org : tools for authoring. webpage is intuitive and also provides API

Technical tutorials for the IETF reboot (Karen O'Donoghue)

15 min.

Technical tutorials and, more recently, Technology Deep Dives (TDD) have provided in-depth information about technical topics of interest to the IETF community. (none are planned for IETF 113)

• What topics would be helpful to cover?

Follow up: Karen will follow up with Dominique about a possible tutorial

• Who could/should provide input and provide review?

Karen provided a bit of background about technical tutorials.

There was no discussion about this item.

emodir activities plan for 2022 brainstorming (All)

There was mention of the possible activites including those listed below and encouragement to share other ideas on the emo-dir mailing list.

Potential participants

• how to bring new work to the IETF (aka beyond BOFs)
• newcomers guide to the IETF (specific ways to dip your toes into the IETF without going to a meeting)
• outreach to possibly affected industries/audiences?
• IAB is considering outreach as well
  • "outreach" is a noted tough issue for the IETF
• Consider outreach to different industries and regions

Current IETF participants

• consider being:
  • a document shepherd
  • WG secretary

WG Chairs

• quick start guide for IETF WG Chairs (particularly new chairs)

Follow up items

• Dhruv will suggest specific in email to Greg and Karen about materials to support regional activities
• Follow up notes will be sent in a day or so
• Karen will follow up on possible Guides support with Systers group

• Karen and Greg will suggest another meeting in 4-6 weeks

• As noted above, Alice provided the following starts to I-D Quick Guides via the emo-dir mailing list

A) Quick-start guide for editing in XML
- Start with a file (an existing I-D or template [1]).
- Edit it w/ the software of your choice.
-> Tip: Rely on the citation library by using xi:include [2].
- Convert it using https://author-tools.ietf.org.
- Upload it to the I-D submission tool [3].
- Share it and update it.

B) Quick-start guide for editing in markdown (specifically kramdown-rfc2629)
- Start with a file (an existing I-D or template [4]).
- Edit it w/ the software of your choice.
-> Tip: Rely on the citation library by using a YAML header [5].
- Convert it using https://author-tools.ietf.org.
- Upload it to the I-D submission tool [3].
- Share it and update it.

Note: If you prefer a GitHub workflow, see instructions on [6].

[1] https://github.com/ietf-authors/rfcxml-templates-and-schemas/blob/main/draft-rfcxml-general-template-standard-00.xml
[2] https://authors.ietf.org/references-in-rfcxml
[3] https://datatracker.ietf.org/submit/
[4] https://github.com/martinthomson/internet-draft-template/blob/main/draft-todo-yourname-protocol.md
[5] https://github.com/cabo/kramdown-rfc2629#references
[6] https://github.com/martinthomson/i-d-template/blob/main/doc/TEMPLATE.md